American Cultural Identity Research Articles

The causal effect of cultural identity on cooperation

The impact of culture on non-kin cooperation has been singled out as critical for economic activity. However, causal evidence of culture's influence on cooperation remains scant. In this paper we provide such evidence, focusing on two key components of culture: preferences and beliefs. Adopting the view that culture is one aspect of an individual's multi-faceted self-concept (identity) we conduct a Prisoner's Dilemma experiment with first- and second-generation Chinese immigrants at a large US public university. In a two-by-two design, we exogenously vary: i) the salience of participants' American or Chinese cultural identities; and ii) the capacity for culture to affect beliefs by randomly providing previous-session cooperation-rate information. Comparing behavior across cultures and information conditions, our results suggest a prominent role for both preferences and beliefs.

French as a US Heritage Language in a Multilingual World

This article examines the role of French as a heritage language in the United States within the context of a multilingual world and a framework of respect for other languages and cultures both locally and globally. As more than 10M Americans are of French ancestry and 2M speak French in the home in the US, French language and Francophone culture are part of American history and cultural identity. In addition, French is a global language spoken by 300M around the world, so French language skills and understanding of Francophone culture are also part of the global skills set. The history and current status of French in the US along with French language and Francophone cultural organizations, French language learning, and organizations and initiatives aimed as valuing the French language and Francophone culture in the US are examined. The article concludes with a discussion of the future of French, the importance of partnerships, the role of advocacy, and an affirmation of the importance of French language and Francophone culture in a globalized multilingual world and an increasingly multilingual American society.

The Collapse of an American Sustained Cultural Identity The American Civil Religion and the Spectre of Trumpism

This text stresses the diabolic spectreof Trumpism, a set of mechanisms for autocracy and authoritarianism, to redefine the United States while Trump’s supporters perceive America as a nation and an idea that have forgotten and betrayed them. Consequently, they deny the “religious” and mythical founding principles of the nation defending a “new religion”. Trump, the high priest of this “newreligion”, and Trumpism represent a crisis of faith around the so-called American civil religion and announce the possible final collapse of an imagined American sustained cultural identity

Cross/Borders:

The US/Mexican border continues to be an important topic of public debate for Americans. The ways journalists frame stories about Latino immigration at the southwest border can have devasting consequences for Latino communities living and residing in the United States. Poets have been quick to respond to misleading, and often pervasive, representations. In previous essays, I have introduced a figure of diverse social and cultural background who testifies against dominant media narratives in the public sphere. I call this figure the transcultural counterwitnesss. This essay turns to Anthony Cody’s Borderline Apocrypha to investigate how his experimental collection offers new consideration of Latino-American identity through its engagement with the longstanding stereotypes in the American public sphere. By observing the transcultural impulses of Cody’s work, this essay explores the ways Borderland Apocrypha experiments with poetic form and voice to provide more insightful considerations of American identity politics and examines how his collection engages with, and opposes, the longstanding stereotypes of Latino communities. A greater transcultural awareness illustrates the ways past violence influences and emerges with contemporary realities and invites readers to contemplate Latino identity in contemporary American culture.

Francis Augustus Silva - A Life

A recent reviewer labelled Francis Augustus Silva a ‘minor league’ artist. It is true that although his works are still respected by experts, his is not a household name with the general public. Among the former he is best known for his careful attention to detail and his treatment of light; and yet, not much is known about him and his inner life. Born two years before Emerson’s American Scholar, Silva grew during one of the formative periods of a distinctive American cultural identity, and his art can be said to reflect this. In his later years, however, Silva witnessed the rise of a new generation of American painters again looking to Europe for inspiration. The years following the end of the Civil War had crushed the early optimism but Silva did not stray from the path. His art kept true to the influence of emotion and the search for harmony with Nature, not just as a manifestation of his convictions but also as an attempt to find a place of solace, and might be our best guide to learning more about him and his personal convictions. Nonetheless, a close reading of some of his life’s events and interactions allows some clarification and a better understanding of this painter.

Sisterhood in the City: Creating Community through Lion Dance

This article examines notions of “sisterhood” by focusing on an all-women's lion dance company called Gund Kwok, based in Boston's Chinatown. Gund Kwok, which limits membership to those who identify as female and Asian American, provides a space for women to perform this traditional male-only dance style. Company members have created a community of “sisters” to address layers of gendered and racial oppression. Despite concerns that scholars have raised about how community formations, such as sisterhoods, can be overly idealistic and potentially harmful, this study highlights the role of sisterhood in Gund Kwok and the important functions it serves for the group. It argues that Gund Kwok is a diverse community that draws from the ideology of sisterhood as a way of articulating Asian American cultural identity outside the scope of Western cultural frameworks and the dance's patriarchal tradition.

Associations of Acculturation and Gender with Obesity and Physical Activity among Latinos.

Objective: Latinos disproportionately experience overweight/obesity (OWOB) and insufficient physical activity (PA), which are risk factors for numerous health conditions. Whereas numerous studies investigate acculturation as a determinant of OWOB and PA, few have examined acculturation multidimensionally, and none has examined its interaction with gender. Methods: Participants were 140 Latino adults. Primary outcomes were status as OWOB and endorsement of insufficient PA. Acculturation was measured with the Multidimensional Acculturation Scale II. Logistic regression analyses were used to examine the moderating effect of gender on the relationship between each acculturation scale and outcome, controlling for education, nativity, and smoking status. Results: Greater Spanish proficiency was significantly associated with lower odds of insufficient PA. Greater American Cultural Identity was significantly associated with higher odds of OWOB. Women had significantly higher odds of endorsing insufficient PA compared to men. Gender did not moderate the relationship between acculturation and either OWOB or PA. Conclusions: Acculturation is similarly associated with OWOB and insufficient PA for Latino men and women. Cultural identity may need to be considered to target OWOB interventions. Acculturation may be less important, and gender more important, to consider for appropriate targeting of PA interventions.

Bonds and barriers: Mental health, service provision, and Middle Eastern/North African cultural identity in the U.S.

This exploratory study examined the intersections of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) American cultural identity and attitudes towards mental health and mental health services. Fifteen in-depth narrative interviews with participants of MENA descent in the United States were analyzed using qualitative thematic content analysis, revealing five primary themes within these data: denial, lack of awareness, stigma/shame, collective identity, and resistance. These results indicate cultural identity plays a unique and significant role in how this population understands and responds to mental health and substance use challenges, in a way that often creates barriers to social service provision and success. Implications and suggestions for how these findings might be used to develop more culturally competent and effective social work interventions for MENA communities are discussed.

Mothering in the Streets: The Familial Adaptation Strategies of Street-Identified Black American Mothers.

Using components of the Family Adjustment and Adaptation Response Model, Critical Race Feminism, and Sites of Resilience this study explored how street-identified Black American mothers engage in street life, while juggling the pressures of childrearing, family, and home life within a distressed, urban Black community. Street-identified Black American mothers are vilified for their intersecting identities of being Black women who are experiencing poverty, and who may also be involved in illegal activity. Black mothers are disproportionately represented in the criminal legal system, but existing research has inadequately examined how street-identified Black mothers "do" family in the confines of structural violence. We addressed this gap by analyzing interview data with 39 street-identified Black American mothers ages 18 to 54. Data were collected using street participatory action research. We identified a typology of three adaptive mothering strategies employed by street-identified Black women as they respond to and cope with violent structural conditions shaping their mothering: constrained mothering, racialized mothering, and aspirational mothering. Findings suggested that these strategies were developed in response to an overarching carceral apparatus, of which these mothers were tasked with avoiding when possible and confronting when necessary. Their mothering strategies were shaped by a collective, Black American cultural identity and worldview, and the mothers possessed a unique way of perceiving the world as criminalized subjects with disproportionate proximity to the punitive State.

Roma 1980: barroco local en contexto global

The Simposio Internazionale Sul Barroco Latinoamericano organized in Rome by the Italo-Latin American Institute in 1980 allows to confront the art and architecture specialists of Latin America and Europe who had built a debate that exceeded the taxonomies of the artistic styles, to install the discussion about Latin American cultural identity through its artistic expressions. Where the mestizo condition will be an autonomous expression of local cultural production in the context of the first formal global discourse in the history of Western art as was the Baroque. The participation of authors from all over America and Europe in an unprecedented dialogue of great diversity, turned this event into an inflection for the knowledge of the historiography of Latin American art in Italy, promoting its discussion and dissemination with an impact that was projected to the present.

The ‘uncorrupted’ Paradise: Religion and imperial epistemic violence on Pitcairn Island

This article analyses chapters from Amasa Delano’s Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres () and Rosalind Amelia Young’s Mutiny of the Bounty and Story of Pitcairn Island, 1790–1894 () in the context of US American perception of Pitcairn Island’s cultural identity. It envisions both Delano’s account of the island and the Californian Seventh-day Adventists’ missionary work, as described by Young, as examples of epistemic violence. The latter derives from imperial misrepresentations of the islanders as well as an imposition of US American cultural identity upon them. The violence committed against Pitcairn’s community is discussed in connection to Delano’s self-proclaimed approach of non-intervention and his depiction of the islanders as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ‘children of nature’, as well as to the direct involvement of the Adventists who converted the islanders. This article tests whether Delano’s and the Adventists’ approaches are mutually exclusive or whether they represent two different visions of the same imperialist project to constitute Pitcairn Islanders as the colonial ‘Other’.

“They Look Like They’re Trying to Pull Up Nails with Their Heels”: Ricardo Güiraldes’s Response to Cultural Appropriation in Don Segundo Sombra

Cultural appropriation has often been linked to American treatment of indigenous cultures. In Playing Indian, for example, Philip J. Deloria investigates how images of Indianness, however inauthentic, stereotypical, or completely ethnocentric, work to help white Americans come to terms with their history of conquest and possession. While the term cultural appropriation has been linked to the conflict between dominant and indigenous cultures as Deloria suggests, it is used far less frequently with respect to American and Latin American cultural identities. Yet, the preponderance of movies and literary works in which Americans follow the same rubric – use Latin American culture to define American cultural identity – evoke the same sense of loss on the part of Latin Americans, in this case, Argentines. For over a century, for example, the gaucho has been examined, evaluated, and reevaluated by Argentines within gauchesque literature to make sense of modernization, notions of civilization versus barbarism, and what creates argentinidad, or what it means to be Argentine. Ricardo Güiraldes sought to respond to the cultural appropriation and misrepresentation of the gaucho, specifically that gaucho culture could be taken up by anyone and used for any purpose, no matter how benign; and that gauchos were a part of the past, eschewing modernization in forms such as industrial ranching and technology when, in fact, they embraced it. In Don Segundo Sombra, Güiraldes addresses these issues. Rather than permit cultural appropriation and ethnocentrism to remain unremarked upon, Güiraldes demonstrates that gaucho culture has remarkable qualities that cannot be imitated by novices, both foreign and native. He then examines gaucho culture, particularly the link between frontier life and economic displacement, in order to champion the gaucho and argentinidad as the models for Argentines to follow.

The Role of Community in Black Identity Development and Occupational Choice

Black Americans have historically been excluded from societal associations and faced wavering instability in their households, forcing them to work together for their individual and collective well-being. In past research, more than half of Black American students enrolled in school opted to pursue social or educational careers. Findings suggest that Black Americans’ occupational development is influenced by their family and community ties. In this conceptual paper, the foundation of the development of identity in African American culture is presented, as it relates to occupational decision-making. First, we discuss the influences of general identity development on occupational decision-making. Second, we argue that Black cultural identity is multidimensional, with strong community and family factors that play a special role in occupational choice. Third, we suggest future research paradigms to link racial identity, culture, and occupational choice among Black American students. By exploring the fundamental beliefs of Black cultural identity, and how they buffer against each other, Black American students will be better able to make occupational decisions.

The Relationship Among Trauma, Acculturation, and Mental Health Symptoms in Somali Refugees

More than 100,000 Somali refugees have resettled in the United States, creating a need for additional research about mental health needs and premigration experiences that precede resettlement. The purpose of this study was to learn more about premigration traumatic experiences, the process of acculturation following resettlement, and the relationship between premigration trauma, acculturation, and mental health. Eighty Somali refugees from two mid-sized Midwestern cities participated. It was hypothesized that acculturation would mediate the relationship between premigration trauma and mental health symptoms. The results partially supported this hypothesis, dependent upon the dimension of acculturation included in the path analysis. Unexpected relationships among the various acculturation dimensions in the model (American cultural identity, English language competency, and American cultural competency) occurred with traumatic experiences, mental health symptoms, and time in the United States. We discuss implications and directions for future research, practice, advocacy, and training.

On the Familiar and the Unfamiliar in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah

On the Familiar and the Unfamiliar in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah Kyle Woodend (bio) For many expatriates, one of the great contemporary favorites is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah—a novel that follows two former lovers Ifemelu and Obinze as they separately move abroad and then both return changed and unchanged to Nigeria.1 While abroad, the characters navigate projective and pejorative views on Africa and Africans in the West while also engaging a cosmopolitan desire for dialogue, participation, and production in the increasingly interconnected world in which their stories take place. In view of the characters' cosmopolitan trajectories, Adichie's comedic insight, and the novel's rather rosy ending, Americanah is not only a critical examination of migrant identity in American (and British) culture but is also something of a comfort read for those who live on cultural borders, in the liminal spaces both inside and outside of various societies. With this in mind, we might ask what a comfort read might be when the subject matter involves what Bharati Mukherjee calls, regarding transnational and migrant fiction, "the trauma of self-transformation."2 Is a comfort read still a retreat from the uncertainties and anxieties of the world into the easy space of the already-known? In transnational fiction, is the familiar a comfort zone, the ultimate aim of the protagonist, a curtain to be pulled back by the narrative, or something else altogether? We might be tempted to view the act of reading a favorite novel as akin to eating a comfort food. In this case, it would be reasonable to think of a comfort read as emotionally undemanding and lisible,3 perhaps embodied by the image of Raymond Chandler's detective fiction, the Hogwarts world of J. K. Rowling, or the erotic romance of E. L. James. To be sure, any novel could be read for comfort, as it would depend as much on the sensibility of a reader as the genre of fiction, but the common notion of the comfort x (comfort food, show, novel) tends to indicate the easygoing and the conventional. In this view, the objective would be a retreat from the chaos of the world into the cozy space of the familiar, whether this is familiarity with a genre or a particular novel. Therefore, the fiction would enable a temporary withdrawal from the outside world into the space of the known to generate a sense of pleasure and perhaps safety. [End Page 166] Of course, such a view can become complicated when the comfort read of choice falls into the realm of the political or the weird, where the fiction aims to "escape from the prison-house of the known";4 still, one could just as well argue that the unfamiliar has become familiar by the third or fourth reading of a story. This is the first and perhaps the most obvious challenge to the notion of the familiar as a retreat from the world: For a subject, a situation or act can progress from the unknown to the familiar through repetition; for instance, a beginner pilot might be anxious, but flying might later become a source of relaxation. Second, to problematize further the common conception of the familiar, Sigmund Freud's concept of the unheimlich interrogates this idea of the familiar as the safe and secure; he defines the unheimlich as "that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar."5 This notion places the familiar at the heart of the unknown where it becomes a source of the utmost anxiety. Still, because the goal of psychoanalysis is to bring to light the (un)familiar lodged within the subject's sense of self and perception of the other, the trajectory remains that of familiarization. Here, the familiar lies at the end of a progressive trajectory from obscurity to enlightenment, for when the symptom becomes familiar, the process is completed.6 Last, the (un)familiar can also move in the inverse direction. In an article on Adichie's Americanah, Caroline Levine discusses the unfamiliar beneath the familiar, arguing that Adichie's narrative strategy of defamiliarization highlights the inconsistencies inherent in the...

Performance and Identity in Adrian Piper’s Work

Adrian Piper’s career which spans close to 60 years illustrates the passage in American art from conceptualism to performance art at the turn of the 1970s. She uses the language of conceptualism to interrogate, through performance, the notion of identity in American culture. Confronting her viewers with racial stereotypes, or presenting strategies of retreat, her performances suggest that identity is a fluctuating notion, one which can only exist in dialogue between artist and audience. Her critique of essentialism is at the heart of artworks which are to be construed as social contracts binding artist and audiences together in the definition of the self.

Nasz dramat erotyczny Witolda Gombrowicza — „europejskość” na sprzedaż

NASZ DRAMAT EROTYCZNY BY WITOLD GOMBROWICZ: ‘EUROPEANNESS’ ON SALE The essay is an analysis of a serious of newspaper articles written by Witold Gombrowicz in the 1940s in Argentina, which were later published in a volume entitled Nasz dramat erotyczny [Our Erotic Drama]. The idea of collective identity and the changing patterns of its construction are key to the analysis. The writer’s individual projects prove useful in the contemporary analysis of wartime texts by Gombrowicz, as they highlight the specificity of various elements of European and South American cultural identities, which are often contradictory.

Variaciones sobre la figura de Calibán en América Latina. La identidad como problema

Readings on Caliban as a metaphor for Latin American culture are mandatory to address the problem of Latin American cultural identity; any reader interested in it has come up against such images, either to accept them or to refute them. The figure is approached in José Enrique Rodó's Ariel, which synthesizes the Caliban vision, from a utilitarian and materialistic perspective. On the other hand, a second reading on Caliban is suggested, as a figure that symbolically expresses the Latin American subject as a colonized man. In this case, the interpretations of Aníbal Ponce (1935) and Roberto Fernández Retamar (1971/2000) are identified, being the latter the one that best summarizes this perspective. Thus, the article offers an examination of this debate and a critique of this discussion is proposed. To do so, resorting to a new Latin American tradition on this problem, such as the decolonial positions based on Fernandez Retamar's studies will be avoided; instead we will deal with Caliban as a myth of the European savage. From this perspective, the article seeks to rethink the problem of Latin American identity not in a dichotomous way.  

Posmorriña in Ángel Rama’s Tierra sin mapa

The Uruguayan Ángel Rama (1926-1983) is widely recognized as a pioneer in the development of cultural studies in Latin America. This article proposes that there was a lesser-known side to the socially conscious, historicist Rama that was expressed mostly in intimate writings: a romantic, essentialist Rama. The focus is a semi-fictional work, Tierra sin mapa (1959), which recounts the stories Rama’s inmigrant mother told him in Montevideo about her childhood in rural Galicia. In retelling her reminiscences, which were triggered by the homesickness that in Galician is termed morriña, Rama relives his mother’s experiences as his own. This process is here called posmorriña, in an echo of the term ‘postmemory’, coined by Marianne Hirsch to denote the experience of children of victims of trauma. The article argues that this maternal Galicia left a mark on the young intellectual that played a key role in his understanding of Latin American cultural identity. It further suggests that Rama’s experience may be paradigmatic of those of other writers in his time and place.

A Tornado Hitting the Homeland: Disturbing American Foundational Myths in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine

Historically, the United States has always been a country of immigration. Yet, in light of recent political events, a form of nativism and sedentarism is re-emerging that seeks to preserve what is generally perceived as essentially American: an ethnically white and male identity that has its origins in the foundational myths of the pastoral, the frontier, and the West. The American Midwest is where the allegedly “real” America lies: it is what Anthony D. Smith has termed an 2ethnoscape”: a landscape imbued with historical and cultural meaning that has come to represent true “Americanness”. In her 1989 novel Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee uses the figure of Jasmine, an undocumented female immigrant from India, to disrupt this traditional trope of “the West” as the perceived location of American cultural identity. She liberates the land from its national, historical, and ethnic inscriptions by subverting the very foundational myths of the pastoral, the frontier, manifest destiny, virgin land, and the melting-pot, that are so crucial to the justification of this exclusive as well as exclusionary identity… This article analyzes the processes and mechanisms through which Mukherjee liberates the landscape: Firstly, she satirizes the ideal of the American pastoral and exposes the assumption of a stable, uniquely American landscape as purely imaginative. She then subverts the notion of the global city as the ideal location of immigrants, where “the other” can be safely contained outside the homeland and instead makes the Midwest ethnoscape the space where her protagonist uproots American national identity. Through her presence in the American heartland, Jasmine disturbs and challenges naturalized notions of America and constructs a new homeland that is open for all immigrants following her. Mukherjee thus shifts the perspective away from seeing the American homeland as a pre-existing place in need of defense, and proposes a fluid understanding of home that has acquired new relevance in light of recent political events.